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“Stop it, Lysandra!” Gabe spat out, his face dark with fury.
“You… you know her?” I said, my head whipping to stare down at him.
He didn’t have to say anything. The look on his face was enough.
“You know her,” I said with a touch of bitterness. It wasn’t a question this time. “This whole time, I knew you were hiding something from me, but I blamed this place… the way you didn’t want to get hurt. What is going on? What is really going on?”
“Oh, this is going to be good,” Lysandra said. I had no idea where she was hiding, but her voice made my skin crawl. She was far too smug and gleeful about the misery she was putting us through.
“Talk,” I said, staring down at Gabe.
My hands wrapped around the bars of my cage. I wanted to squeeze something, hit something. I felt stupid, naïve, and vulnerable, and I had a feeling it was going to get worse.
“Does he really need to?” Lysandra chuckled. “You haven’t figured it out yet, dear? Why, that face was in all the papers. In fact… you’d think it might remind you of home.”
Home? Why would it remind me of home unless…
“I—It’s your house…” I said, less of a question and more of a statement. A rock sank in my stomach, and I finally recognized the face under all that makeup.
Ripper Randall. Or, rather, one of them.
“I moved into your home,” I said hoarsely, releasing the bars and falling back against the opposite side of the cage. The momentum of my movement swung it a bit.
“Listen… please, please, God… Marnie, just listen,” he said, his voice breaking. “Look at me. Look in my eyes. You know I’m not a murderer.”
I closed my eyes and sucked in a breath. I knew something had been familiar about him, just like I knew I shouldn’t date musicians or buy fucking haunted houses. Why was I always going against what everyone said? Why did I have to ignore the alarm bells and the signs always? I could sit there and blame it on childhood trauma or a fatal design flaw in my character, but it really boiled down to two things.
One, I wanted to recognize the good in things.
Two, I didn’t recognize that I deserved to be treated well.
But… Gabe had treated me well. He’d protected me and been kind to me. He looked at me in a way that told me his entire universe had shifted to allow me in it. He was grumpy and, okay… dead, but he wasn’t cruel. And I did recognize good in him, more in fact than I recognized in most living souls. The things I’d read about the Randall house simply did not match the man in front of me, no matter how scary he physically looked.
“You have thirty seconds,” I said, my voice paper thin. “You’ve been… good to me so far. Convince me.”
“I… we… we lived way out of town, and it was a different time,” he began. I repositioned myself so I could watch him speak. “My father was paranoid after the war, scared of war crimes… which I have no doubt he did. War gives a certain type of man free rein… and a good cover.” He spoke faster, trying to get as much out as he could before I stopped listening. “My momma had twins. Twins, but Pops didn’t trust the government, and we were homeschooled. Hell, we were barely legal citizens. So people always just figured there was one of us runnin’ around, and no one was ever wiser. Besides the fact that Pops hated me.” His face looked wistful for a second. “I was always more like my mom.”
I watched his face carefully, trying to find any deceit, but he looked so sincere. In my heart, I still believed him. The story was certainly longer than thirty seconds, but I had to know where it was going. Besides, it was an empty threat. Where the hell was I going to go? I was stuck in a cage.
“My momma,” he said softly, “was the best person I ever knew. I did everything to keep her safe, and my dad and my brother called me all sorts of names for it. I was soft and weak, they said. The girls started disappearing when I was seventeen. Michael, my brother… He was handsome, and the girls trusted a pretty face. He helped my father butcher and torture…”
“Y—You don’t need to get into details,” I said quietly.
“The girl who escaped… I let her out,” he said. “I’m the reason everything went down. When my father found out, he and my brother… um, well, they killed me and my momma. She was—”
“They found her,” I finished for him. “But you? They still thought there was only one son. They couldn’t have still thought that if they’d found your body?”
“They didn’t,” he said grimly. “I was… disposed of thoroughly. I had a record with the cops, just from bein’ loud and wantin’ to get out of Delaney. You know, street races, some underage drinking, nothing crazy, but we were always told to both go by Michael in public, and we could never be out at the same time. I never got close enough for anyone to tell the difference. We weren’t allowed to make friends. Knowing my brother, that was probably a good thing.”
“Thoroughly disposed of…” I repeated with a grimace. What an awful sentence to say about a human life.
I shuddered, half wanting to know what that meant and half never wanting to find out.
Suddenly, the office door burst open, and I finally got a good look at the puppetmaster for this whole situation. At first, I focused on her pale face and dark curls, thinking she was just a normal woman. In fact, she was beautiful, and I almost felt jealous she knew Gabe so well. I yelped out a shocked, stifled scream when she scurried all the way inside, and I finally registered her full form.
Her lower half was a fat, wide spider abdomen, sleek and black. Red silk cascaded down either side from her modified dress, and her eight black legs shone like they were lacquered. The air in the room seemed to be sucked up by her presence, and the office now felt two sizes too small.
Now, this was a killer. I could look at Gabe and take in his scary appearance and realize he wasn’t a murderer, and I could look at Lysandra and know she was nothing but an evil killer. Despite her pretty face and her impeccable hair and makeup, her soul was black and rotten. She even smelled sickeningly sweet, like overripe fruit or hot, bloated roadkill.
